As is a tale, so is life
not how long is is, but how good it is
is what matters
Sunday, July 2, 2023
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
Collegamenti Oliver Twist e Rosso Malpelo
ROSSO MALPELO 1881 OLIVER TWIST 1837
☝ ☝
SIMILARITIES
orphans
poor
hard-working in bad conditions
suffer abuse
a deep loneliness
the adults are far away and indifferent
relations based on bullying and extreme poverty
selfishness and ignorance as consequences of poverty
their destiny is written in their names
DIFFERENCES
A resigned child a strong-willed rebel
He dies at the end He's adopted at the end
Through the story of Rosso Malpelo, Verga expresses all his pessimism, his hopeless conception of life. Malpelo does not rebel against the injustices he suffers because they seem inevitable to him: if he dreams of rebelling, he immediately returns to what is real and unchangeable from his point of view. The pessimism expressed by Verga in Rosso Malpelo is absolute, it knows no way out, it leads him to think that never having been born would have been better.
Instead, Oliver lives happily with Mr. Brownlow as his adopted son. Dickens is optimistic. In the midst of corruption and degradation, the essentially passive Oliver remains pure-hearted; he steers away from evil when those around him give in to it, and like in a fairy-tale , he eventually receives his reward – leaving for a peaceful life in the country, surrounded by kind friends. On the way to this happy ending, Dickens explores the kind of life an outcast, orphan boy could expect to lead in 1830s London.
Dickens criticizes the system of workhouses and he denounces the situation and the living conditions in those horrible places.He thought that all the injustices and the violence suffered by the poor occured in the city and that are the effect of it.So he idealized the countryside, because in his opinion it was free from poverty and ugliness.
Verga talks about the living conditions in the countryside, especially in very small towns or villages. He doesn't openly criticize the system, but he describes it as it is with detachment and the total impersonality of the narrator. In contrast to Verga, Dickens criticizes the system by exaggerating some aspects of the descriptions and by attacking single people, more than the entire system.
IRONY
In both texts it stimulates critical reflection on the reader's part through a series of more or less evident contrasts. Its aim is to make the reader aware of the distortions, injustices and contradictions to be found in the reality that is being described.
NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE
Verga speaks in the third person, but it's clear that he does not share the community's point of view.We can find a kind of anonymous narrator, but he does not subscribe its point of view. This technique reflects the one of estrangement.
Dickens uses a third-person narrator who is omniscient, but he assumes the points of view of various characters- In the extract Oliver wants some more he adopts Oliver's point of view
CONTRASTS in OLIVER TWIST
the boys' world and the adults' world
the poor and the rich
thinness(hunger) and fatness
submission(fear) and power
THE USE OF PARATAXIS
Rosso Malpelo- a marked use of parataxis
Oliver wants some more- the syntax is discontinuous and broken, acquiring a kind of paratactical form
The purpose is to create an atmoshere of suspense or give the narrative a tone that is firm, rigorous, absolute. It doesn't admit any exception.
Monday, June 26, 2023
Aunt Jennifer's tigers questions
‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ is a 1951 poem by the American poet Adrienne Rich (1929-
2012), published in her first poetry collection, A Change of World, which was
published while the precocious Rich was still in her early twenties.
The speaker describes her aunt’s embroidery featuring tigers who prance proudly and
unafraid, in contrast to the aunt’s own meek, oppressive life and marriage.
Adrienne Rich
Aunt Jennifer's Tigers
Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.
Answer the questions
1.Describe the tigers created by Aunt Jennifer.
2.Why did Aunt Jennifer choose to embroider tigers on the panel?
3.What will happen to Aunt Jennifer’s tigers when she is dead?
4.How has Aunt Jennifer created her tigers? What traits of tigers do they reveal?
5.Why are Aunt Jennifer’s hands fluttering through her wool?
6.Describe the contrast between Aunt Jennifer ‘ and her creation, the tigers.
7.Why do you think Aunt Jennifer created animals that are so different from her own
character?
8.What do the symbols, ‘tigers’, ‘fingers’ and ‘ring’ stand for in the poem, ‘Aunt Jennifer’s
Tigers’?
9.Why did Aunt Jennifer choose to embroider tigers on the panel?
10.What kind of married life did Aunt Jennifer lead?
11. What will happen to Aunt Jennifer’s tigers when she
Aunt
Jennifer’s Tigers’ is a 1951 poem by the American poet Adrienne Rich
(1929-2012), published in her first poetry collection, A Change of
World, which was published while the precocious Rich was still in her early
twenties.
0 of 1 minute, 12 secondsVolume 0%
Rich was
known for her feminist writings as well as her poetry, and this fact is
relevant for an analysis of ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’, in which the speaker
describes her aunt’s embroidery featuring tigers who prance proudly and
unafraid, in contrast to the aunt’s own meek, oppressive life and marriage.
‘Aunt
Jennifer’s Tigers’: summary
The poem
comprises three stanzas. In the first stanza, the speaker describes the tigers
her aunt has created in an embroidery. On the screen of fabric, the tigers
appear to ‘prance’ or move in a lively manner against the backdrop, which is
green. They are without fear.
The embroidery also contains some men under a tree, but the tigers are apparently unafraid of the men. They walk about the scene, glossy and smooth and sure of themselves; they are majestic, like knights from the medieval days of chivalry.
In the
second stanza, the speaker describes the movement of her aunt’s finger as she
works on the woollen embroidery with an ivory needle. On the aunt’s finger is
her wedding ring, denoting her marriage to the speaker’s uncle. This wedding
ring is described as sitting heavily on the aunt’s hand, implying the
oppressive weight of marriage as a patriarchal system (of which more below).
The speaker
concludes the poem by thinking about the future. When her aunt dies, her hands
will lie in her grave and even in death they will bear the mark of all of the
suffering and hardship she endured when she was alive. However, the tigers she
has created in the embroidered panel will continue to prance proudly forever,
unafraid of anything.
‘Aunt
Jennifer’s Tigers’: analysis
If we
wished to summarise the meaning of Adrienne Rich’s poem in one sentence, we
could do worse than offer: ‘“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” is about a woman using art
to triumph over the oppression of patriarchy, which rules her life but cannot
rule the art she creates.’ The tigers Aunt Jennifer embroiders represent the
kind of creature she wishes she could be: proud and unafraid of the men in her
life.
In an early
collection of her essays, Lies, Secrets and Silence (1979),
Adrienne Rich observed that throughout history, ‘women’s struggle for
self-determination’ had been ‘muffled in silence’.
The
reference to history is apposite, because ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ may put us
in mind of all of those examples from nineteenth-century women’s fiction in
which female characters wove or painted their stories or desires because they
felt unable to speak them out loud. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s
ground-breaking study of this, The
Madwoman in the Attic, contains many such examples, and came out in the same year as Rich’s
essay collection.
Aunt
Jennifer, then, weaves or embroiders an image of woman – symbolically rendered
into tigers in her artwork – which does not exist, but which is devoutly to be
wished. The tigers are proud, confident, and unafraid: unlike Aunt Jennifer
herself, and many other women, they do not go in fear of the men, beneath the
tree or elsewhere.
The tigers
are a symbol of power but also that ‘self-determination’ Rich identified as
women’s struggle throughout the ages. Their ‘topaz’ colours (some varieties of
the mineral topaz are indeed orange-brown, with some black) contrast sharply
with the green backdrop of the embroidery Aunt Jennifer is working on.
We do not
know the age of the poem’s speaker – the niece (if we assume she is female) of
‘Aunt Jennifer’. But there is something simple about the rhyming couplets of
the poem, with these couplets themselves being arranged into pairs to form
quatrains, and the (largely iambic) pentameter metre of the poem.
The poem’s
rhythms might even put us in mind of children’s nursery rhymes – ‘Humpty Dumpty’, perhaps – and this adds an extra angle to the
poem’s depiction of female subjugation.
How
innocent is the speaker of Rich’s poem? How old, or how young? The key to the
poem’s success as a feminist poem, perhaps, lies in the way Rich’s speaker
seems innocent of the import of the things she is revealing to us: for example,
the link between those men in the first stanza of the poem and the wedding band
weighing down Aunt Jennifer’s finger in the second.
The ivory
in Aunt Jennifer’s needle, meanwhile, is another reminder of the violent and
predatory nature of men, who will hunt and slaughter elephants for their ivory
tusks.
We are
left, then, to piece together these disparate details and form a picture of, on
the one hand, the quiet, meek, and put-upon Aunt Jennifer, and the proud,
fearless, and masterly bravura of the tigers she creates through her art.
There are
only subtle hints given about those ‘ordeals’ she suffered, ordeals her hands
became ‘ringed’ by: both defined and restricted
by, in other words. A key word in that final stanza is ‘mastered’, summoning
the masculine dominance over Aunt Jennifer’s life.
In the last analysis, then, ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ is a poem which
celebrates women’s ability to create art out of their oppression, but the
nature of Aunt Jennifer’s art is at the same time a reminder that she could not
speak out or forge a different path for herself: the (silent) world of those
tigers on their green screen, and the (safely feminine) practice of needlework
was the only outlet for her quiet defiance against marriage and other
patriarchal norms.
Sunday, June 18, 2023
Essay-Women's condition nowadays with reference to A room of one's own by Virginia Woolf
For all
these centuries women have played the role of mirrors, endowed with the magical
and delicious property of reflecting the figure of the man double-sized of the
natural
These were the words
written by Virginia Woolf in A room of one’s own and these are still the words that echo in the
mind of those who observe rationally the society in which we are.
After years of struggle,
women have partly managed to emancipate ourselves, but the path is still long
because we must eradicate those habits and traditions based on a patriarchal
conception of society. For centuries women have been forced to be mothers,
wives, educators, without ever having had the chance to build upthemselves and
without ever having had the chance to rise as they wanted.
The woman has always been
presented from the male point of view, starting from the thirteenth century
with Dante Alighieri up to quote more modern authors such as James Joyce and
his Eveline.
But why did that happen?
Why did no woman ever find the courage to describe the world from her point of
view before Charlotte Brönte or Jane Austen? Why so few women writers in the
history of literature in the various countries of the world?
The answers to these
questions are many, but Virginia Woolf was the one who gave a brilliant
explanation to all these questions in an extraordinary work A Room of one’s
own, which had a great impact on the feminist movement of the 60s and 70s
of the 19th century.
Nowadays
women have the opportunity to study, the opportunity to vote, to work where
they want and above all they are independent, but did women have the same
opportunities as men in the past centuries? Obviously the answer is no, they
didn’t. In most societies women and men have always faced different expectations
about how they should behave or work. Women have been expected to play specific
roles- the wife, the mother, the daughter, the housewife; they have not been
considered to be fit to do jobs generally associated with men, or even to start
a career in politics, to do scientific research or do the same sports as men.
During the Victorian
Age, for example, in England, the ideal Victorian woman was the “angel
in the house”; her place was in the home, she was the pious, respectable
and busy wife, mother and daughter. Victorian women didn’t have the same rights
as men: they could not vote or hold political office, they had limited
education and limited employment opportunities.
Men could
divorce their wives for adultery, but wives could do so only if adultery was
combined cruelty, bigamy or incest.
General
attitudes to sex were a crucial aspect of respectability, with an intense
concern of female chastity, and single women with a child were marginalized as
“fallen women”.
Fortunately,
the condition of the woman has changed over time.
Over the
years, indeed, there have been many women who have fought for their
emancipation; we can remember, for example, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary
Shelley’s mother, who is considered one of the forerunners of the feminist
movement. She campaigned for a more active role for women in society. In
her opinion, if women were treated as subordinate beings and they often
accepted this state of oppression, it was because they didn't have the tools to
avenge their fundamental rights. In particular, she saw education as the key
for promoting better living and social conditions for women.
In the late
19th century women struggled hard to improve their condition, but the early
20th century was an era of emancipation.
Emmeline
Pankhurst is the
icon of the feminist movement of the 20th century, she was a British activist
and politician who led The Women’s Suffrage Movement in the United
Kingdom, helping women gain the right to vote: the suffragettes broke windows,
cut telephone wires, even went to prison. In 1918 they gained the vote for
women over 30, but only in 1928 the age limitation became 21, the same as that
for men.
Virginia
Woolf, A room of one’s own.
In 1929,
Virginia Woolf published A Room’s Of One’s Own, which is a brilliant
feminist essay, where the modern novelist explored the material and
psychological conditions and historical constraints encountered by women
writers. In this essay, Woolf advanced the thesis that “a woman must have money
and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”, in other words, she says
that women must be independent.
Here, the
room is associated with economic independence, not just a space in which
to write. Women must own enough money, if they want to completely devote themselves
to write books.
To make
people understand the importance of women's independence, Woolf creates Judith
Shakespeare, the imaginary sister of the great dramatist William
Shakespeare, she’s the example of the tragic fate a highly intelligent woman would
have met.
This is the
way she figures out her possible story in one section of the essay.
Judith was
beaten by her father, she hated the idea of marriage and one night she decided
to run away to pursue her dream: She wanted to enter the world of art and
literature, because she possessed fantasy and was good with the musicality of
words.
She was not
accepted into theatres, no one taught her to act, she could not eat in taverns
and she could not wander the streets of London at midnight alone. The men abused
her, became pregnant and eventually decided to commit suicide. She was
abandoned by everyone and no one would ever remember her.
“She lives
in you and in me,” said Woolf, talking about Judith “and in many
other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and
putting the children to bed.”
Moreover,
according to Virginia Woolf, women had to revolutionize the world of
literature, they had to create a new narrative genre in which they could
express reality through their eyes with an innovative language, as Jane Austen
did with the novel, this is because women have always seen the world from a
different perspective and need a new literary tradition.
Woolf
closes the essay with an exhortation to her audience of women to take up the
tradition that has been so hardly bequeathed to them, and to increase the
endowment for their own daughters.
Gender
equality is not only a fundamental human right, but a necessary foundation for
a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world. Sustainable development goal 5
is related to the importance of gender equality and the empowerment of all
women and girls. There has been progress over the last decades: more girls are
going to school, fewer girls are forced into early marriage, more women are serving
in parliament and positions of leadership, and laws are being reformed to
advance gender equality.
In many
countries in the world, gender equality has been achieved and today there are
many women writers such as JK Rowling or Isabel Allende, or in addition
to the world of literature, women have also been welcomed in politics or in
some other fields. In Italy, for example, the Prime Minister is currently a
woman Giorgia Meloni.
However, despite
these gains, many challenges remain: discriminatory laws and social norms
remain pervasive, women continue to be underrepresented at all levels of
political leadership, and women and girls all over the world report
experiencing physical or sexual violence.
There are
also countries where women are still exploited, beaten and killed, where between sixty and eighty percent of marriages are
forced and violence, especially sexual violence, is the order of the day and lots of women cannot read or write.
The
coronavirus outbreak has increased existing inequalities for women and girls
across every sphere – from health and the economy, to security and social
protection.
We are a
long way from real equality.
Gender
equality is more than a goal in itself. It is a precondition for meeting the
challenge of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and building
good government. -Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the UN.
Saturday, June 10, 2023
NESWSPEAK (1984 by Orwell) and today's Internet abbreviations-examples
NESWSPEAK and today's Internet abbreviations
SUP=What's up
BF=Boyfriend
GF=Girlfriend
BTW=By the way
THNX= Thanks
TGIF= Thank God it's Friday
LMK=Let me know
NGL=Not gonna lie
ISTG=I swear to God
GTG=Got to go
Monday, May 22, 2023
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
Sunday, May 7, 2023
Tuesday, April 25, 2023
Saturday, April 15, 2023
BAMBOOZLE GAMES Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
https://www.baamboozle.com/games
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-bamboozle game
https://www.baamboozle.com/classic/307501
https://www.baamboozle.com/classic/490124
https://www.baamboozle.com/classic/1430647
Sunday, April 2, 2023
Dorian Gray vs Andrea Sperelli- Collegamento Wilde e D'Annunzio
AESTHETICISM
ITALY ENGLAND
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO OSCAR WILDE
poet/novelist/playwright
↘↙
Anti-conformist spirit
Foppish way of dressing
his greatest play his greatest play
↳ ↳
La figlia di Iorio 1904 The importance of being Earnest 1895
One of his NOVELS His only NOVEL
IL PIACERE (1889) The Picture of Dorian Gray(1891)
ANDREA surrounds himself with many objects and lives a luxurious life, while speaking of DORIAN we must focus attention on an art object, which is the portrait to which his story of eternal youth is linked. Andrea loves a kind of widespread beauty, general, that applies to all the aspects of life and reality; while in the case of Dorian beauty is more personal, because it is he who is beautiful, it is himself a work of art. Both of them are against the bourgeois prejudices. Finally, both Andrea and Dorian go in search of a kind of pleasure that manifests itself in a thousand ways, so it is a pleasure:
• physical: for example in the case of Dorian who seduces many women
• aesthetic: as the continuous search for beauty
• intellectual: such as wanting to surround themselves with works of literature
• artistic: such as the fact of wanting to surround themselves with works of art
Andrea Sperelli is a young count, who, like Dorian Gray, looks for beauty and despises the middle class world. He leads an extraordinary life, which he lives as a work of art, and rejects the basic rules of morality and social interaction. However, this extraordinary sensitivity also implies a certain corruption.
Dorian Gray is a young heir who makes friends with the corrupt and manipulative Lord Henry Wotton and the good-hearted Basil Hallward, who paints a portrait for him. After having this portrait painted, Dorian's ego is vastly inflated and he becomes very narcissistic which prompts Dorian to wish to become immortal and make his painting age instead of himself.
Monday, March 13, 2023
THE MEDIEAVAL BALLADS
BALLAD form the LATIN “ BALLARE” to dance
Definition An oral narrative poem which was often sung, it belongs to the ORAL TRADITIION
What it is about? One single situation, one story
Origins? ENGLAND and SCOTLAND between the 13th and the 15th century
Authors? Anonymous
Structure? Usually short stanzas of two or four lines
Narrative technique? Mixture of narration and dialogue (no detailed descriptions); rapid flashes; no continuous sequence of events
Narrator? impersonal,never intruding or moralizing
Language? concrete,simple, musical and repetitive; use of stock phrases and refrains
Refrain? some words or lines which are repeated at intervals, usually at the end of a stanza
Incremental repetition? a line or stanza is repeated but with some addition advancing the story
Rhyme Scheme? usually ABCB
Themes? love (unhappy love), death,jealousy,revenge,war betrayal, the magic and the supernatural
Characters? not described in detail; no psychological complexity
Interest in ballads? Ballads were written down in later periods; in 1765 Thomas Percy assembled and published the famous collection Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. In the Romantic period poets wrote literary ballads
BALLADS of MAGIC
BORDER BALLADS
BALLADS of LOVE and domestic tragedy
BALLADS of OUTLAWS with the cycle of ROBIN HOOD
( a great folk hero who probably lived in the 12th century)
Traditionally depicted as being dressed in greenis often portrayed as "robbing from the rich and giving to the poor"alongside his band of Merry Men
Tuesday, February 14, 2023
What are human rights?
What are human rights?
Human rights are rights we
have simply because we exist as human beings - they are not granted by any state. These universal
rights are inherent to us all, regardless of nationality, sex,
national or ethnic origin, color, religion, language, or any other status. They
range from the most fundamental - the right to life - to those that make life
worth living, such as the rights to food, education, work, health, and liberty.
The Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the UN
General Assembly in 1948, was the first legal document to set out the
fundamental human rights to be universally protected. The UDHR, which turned 70 in 2018, continues to be the foundation of all
international human rights law. Its 30 articles provide the principles and building blocks of
current and future human rights conventions, treaties and other legal
instruments.
In the UK the
Human Rights Act 1998 sets out the fundamental
rights and freedoms that everyone in the UK is entitled to. It
incorporates the rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights
(ECHR) into domestic British law. The Human Rights Act came into force in
the UK in October 2000.
The European
Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) protects the human rights of people
in countries that belong to the Council of Europe.
(
What is the Council of Europe? Formed in 1949, the Council of Europe is
completely separated from the European Union and much larger, with 47 members
compared to the EU’s 28. The UK became a Council member 24 years before it
joined the EU.)
All 47 Member States of the
Council, including the UK, have signed the Convention.
(In brackets the authors, novels
or poems you can ASSOCIATE the articles
to!)
- the right to life (Article 2) The War Poets
- freedom from torture (Article 3) 1984, Refugee Blues
- freedom from slavery (Article 4)
- the right to liberty (Article 5) 1984
- the right to a fair trial (Article 6) 1984
- the right not to be punished for something that wasn’t against the
law at the time (Article 7)
- the right to respect for family and private life (Article 8) Oscar
Wilde’s life
- freedom of thought, conscience and religion (Article 9) 1984 Refugee
Blues
- freedom of expression (Article 10) 1984
- freedom of assembly (Article 11) 1984
- the right to marry and start a family (Article 12)
- the right not to be discriminated against in respect of these
rights (Article 14) Oliver Twist, Refugee Blues
- the right to protection of property (Protocol 1, Article 1)
- the right to education (Protocol 1, Article 2) Jane Eyre, Oliver
Twist
- the right to participate in free elections (Protocol 1, Article 3)
- the abolition of the death penalty (Protocol 13)
The European Court of Human
Rights
The European Court of Human
Rights applies and protects the rights and guarantees set out in the European
Convention on Human Rights.
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